By JOACHIM BESSING

There was no other artist more nineties, or dare I say more 20th-century, than Mike Mills. Indeed a graphic artist (and are there any more left today?). From his artwork for the Beastie Boys and Air to that collector’s item from the last days of Mo’ Wax before James Lavelle had to leave the building: a record sleeve containing no vinyl, but instead a set of squarish posters and a sheet of stickers with a message to the record dealer reading, “File under interior decoration.” Since then, he has collaborated with innumerable cultural figures well before they came to define this decade.

But when I spoke with Mills at his art opening in Berlin, “The Only Way Out Is Through,” he seemed to deliberate more on a blunt way “out” than a culturally allied way “through” whatever it is we’ve come to find ourselves “in” these days.

He is a very shy man. Or is it depression? Recession? There was one poster in the show of a family tree quite neatly made up of sedatives. He whispered of being jet-lagged. I suggested biking to increase melatonin, but he very kindly shook his head, suggesting that there are “medications of all kinds.”

We’re entering into Bret Easton Ellis territory here, The Rules of Attraction – another great farewell to the 20th century. Then we started going through Thai-born Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s unpublished story “In the Nineties,” and we got a similarly wonderful, yet ominous, feeling: it was the nervousness, the bright lights (way too bright), the air-conditioned houses for sale, the protagonist’s lamenting voice echoing melodies from Stacey Pullen, maybe. We could call this sentiment “happy-sad,” and it may never be cured; it’s a sign of the times. But it’s not at all about the 1990s, really. It’s about what people tried to grasp onto while slipping from one century into the next. And as with all great transitions, you can hardly tell what was avant-garde until it becomes contemporary. The Bangkok of the 1990s seems to be reflected, mirror-like, into a perspective ’09 for everybody – or if not yet, then they will be sooner or later. But precisely how long will it take?